W. Kinsella - Box Socials

When Curly and Gunhilda got back from their honeymoon, having driven as far west on the Edmonton-Jasper Highway as Edson, where they stayed in a granary-sized cabin at the Bide-A-Wee Tourist Court for two dollars a night, they moved into Banker Gordonjensen’s eight-room house with a cistern and indoor plumbing, and learned that the banker, along with almost everybody else in North America, was more or less insolvent.

Alvin Olaf McClintock was born nine months after the night at the Hide-A-Way Tourist Court in Entwistle, Alberta, where Curly McClintock discovered what it was homely girls tried hard at on their honeymoon. And about two years later, as one of Curly’s brothers was watching Alvin Olaf toddle across the floor of the kitchen at Banker Gordonjensen’s eight-room house with a cistern and indoor plumbing, the baby wearing only a diaper and a smile, the brother said to Curly, ‘By golly, that baby’s built just like the box on Daddy’s dump truck.’

And Curly looked close at Alvin Olaf, toddling across the floor, wearing only a diaper and a smile, and said he had to agree, ‘That boy is built like the box on Daddy’s dump truck.’ A dump truck that was soon to become Curly’s, because only a few months later, Black Darren McClintock pushed back from the table after a feed of partridge parts and fried turnips, unbuckled his belt and passed away.

The McClintocks held a family meeting, where it was decided that since Curly was the only one married, and since his father-in-law, Banker Gordonjensen, knew how to handle money, even if he didn’t have any anymore, that Curly should inherit the dump truck and the twice-weekly run to Edmonton to take the cream cans full of cream to the dairies, and bring back supplies from the grocery wholesalers to the towns in the Six Towns area.

‘Hiya, Truckbox,’ Curly McClintock and his brother said several times to the baby, who grinned back like he understood, as he walked face-first into a wall.

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